Review: Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 (360)

Now instead of just giving us one mode of play, we now have six. Deadline, King, Evolved, Pacifism, Waves and Sequence. Evolved and Waves are what most players will know, the latter being the game featured in PGR4. King and Pacifism are the two most interested modes. In King there are three bubbles, and the rule is that you can only shoot within those bubbles. Enemies may not be able to penetrate the bubble but you can’t stay there for too long because after three seconds the bubble will start to rapidly shrink. So it’s a case of shooting as many enemies as you can before running like the wind. It becomes increasingly difficult as the spawn times become shorter and faster enemies start to appear.

Pacifism is also a great mode. In this you can’t shoot at all and to destroy the blue shapes you need to go through gates causing a small explosion. The difficult part here is if you hit the end of the gates then you die, something which is incredibly difficult when gates and enemies soon start to spawn constantly. Deadline is similar to Evolved, only this time you have a three minute time limit and infinite lives, and Sequence is level based where each level has different enemy attack patterns. Each game mode has different music and unique sound effects with the whole game looking simply stunning, which is strange considering you’re just looking at different shapes.

Geoms which made there first appearance in Galaxies are back. For those that don’t know these are little shapes that each enemy drops when destroyed, collecting them increases your multiplier, crucial if you want to get high scores which lets face it is the entire point of Geometry Wars. A brilliant new feature is how the high scores are now shown. During each game in the top right corner of the screen it displays the next person in your friends list who is above you in the rankings. It sounds simple but it turns the game into something so much more brilliant. You’ll become obsessed with beating the next person in your friends, making hours seem like minutes. It’s the most addictive game we’ve played in ages.

We didn’t quite know how much this sequel would differ much, thinking it would just be a refined version of the original, but instead Bizarre Creations has given us an incredible amount of new content. It’s disappointing that online co-op hasn’t been included (only local), it is however quite likely it wouldn’t work due to the twitch gameplay required. It still doesn’t stop Geometry Wars 2 being an absolute steal at 800 points.

Rating: 9 / 10

Words by Adam Gulliver